With Ebersol Gone, NBC Passes Broadcast Baton to ‘Today’ Producer

Jim Bell in the NBC control room in the International Broadcast Center in London on Wednesday.Credit
Jed Jacobsohn for The New York Times

For decades, American audiences have watched the Olympics as defined by a few star producers like Roone Arledge, Dick Ebersol, Mike Weisman and Mike Pearl.

Starting Friday, with the opening ceremony of the London Games, it will be Jim Bell’s turn to orchestrate NBC’s coverage as if he has been doing it for years.

His task is twofold. He must replace Ebersol, who resigned last year as chairman of the NBC Sports Group and is a consultant to Bell in London. Bell also has to show his bosses at Comcast, which owns a controlling interest in NBC Universal, that he is the right person to entrust with producing the London Games (which are certain to lose money) and up to four more Olympics through 2020.

Bell, 45, is unfazed by the pressure, or prefers not to promise too much. He defers to those within NBC Sports who will report to him in London; he has worked with many of them since he joined the network in time for the 1992 Games in Barcelona. And while he built his reputation as a sports producer, with lots of Olympic experience, he has been the executive producer of “Today” for seven years.

Even as he was preparing for the Olympic assignment, he was involved in trying to fend off a ratings challenge to “Today” from ABC’s “Good Morning America” and in replacing Ann Curry as the co-host with Savannah Guthrie.

“With ‘Today,’ you get to the line at 7 with the expectation of how things will be, but they can change so quickly,” Bell said in a recent phone interview. “In the Olympics, you have a plan on paper and you have to be ready to roll as things change.”

“Today” also taught him at least one less substantial lesson.

“I can make a mean soufflé,” said Bell, who upends expectations about where a major television executive takes lunch by occasionally escaping to a glatt kosher restaurant in the diamond district near his office in Midtown Manhattan.

Bell deflects questions about the impact of taking over from Ebersol, who often emerged bleary-eyed from 20-hour stints in the Olympic control room. Ebersol oversaw eight Olympic productions.

“I feel very comfortable,” Bell said. “I realize there’s a story there, but I don’t think much about it. I’m thrilled to have spent so much time working with him.”

Weisman, who produced NBC’s coverage of the 1988 Seoul Games and consulted for the network on a few this century, recalled being asked by Ebersol to advise Bell at the Salt Lake Games in 2002. “He said to me, ‘Mike, hang out with this kid Jim Bell; just stay behind him in case he needs your help,’ ” he said by telephone. “So I was assigned to the control room for the late-night show for two weeks in case Jim Bell needed me. And for two weeks Jim Bell didn’t need me.”

Weisman said Bell’s job involved more than planning which sports will be shown when (live or on tape), which story lines to juggle, how to react to unexpected results and when to plug in a feature. He said Bell would have to deal with staff egos, the needs of inexperienced analysts, the news media, advertisers, Comcast executives, the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, the host country and other entities.

“Nobody has ever been more suited than Jim to be the executive producer of the Olympics, given his experience at ‘Today,’ ” Weisman said. “For all of Roone’s brilliance, the very first time he sat in that chair he was no way as qualified as Jim Bell. But Jim has a long way to go before he’s as great as Roone was.”

Bell, a former defensive lineman at Harvard who is 6 feet 4 inches and about 250 pounds, recalled an incident that occurred at the tail end of the Barcelona Games. He was told he quickly had to rustle up video of the marathon’s last-place finisher — a partly blind Mongolian named Pyambu Tuul. Tuul was nearly two hours behind the winner and had to finish outside the Olympic stadium, which was being readied for the closing ceremony.

“I chased it down through a healthy mixture of fear and desperation,” Bell said. “It was difficult to find because the Olympics were essentially over. But I found it in some host broadcasting cabin in a little cabinet where they’d brought the tape back. I pleaded with them to give me a dub of it.”

And, he added, “Bob Costas eloquently told the story of how this guy simply came to the Olympics to compete.”

Twenty years later, Bell is in control of an Olympic unit generating far more than the 161 hours on the broadcast network that NBC televised from Barcelona. (The disastrous, money-losing, pay-per-view Olympics Triplecast was born, and died, that year.) Now, the Olympics will also be on the NBC Sports Network, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo, and all sports will be streamed live at nbcolympics.com.

Asked what his imprint on the London Games would be, Bell said: “Watch and find out. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’ve had a great formula that’s worked. And you’ll see some new things.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2012, on page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: With Ebersol Gone, NBC Passes Broadcast Baton to ‘Today’ Producer. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe